“In depth? That’s for New York effin Magazine,” Willis grumbled. He shook his head. “People there are giving you grief?”
“They’re all pissed off. Everyone,” Jamie said.
“That’s right, you pissed people off. And as a black man, I’ll tell who that story really pissed off. Me! That’s what good journalism does.”
Jamie was unsure of what to say. He hadn’t had even a decent night’s sleep in days. The bags under his eyes felt like they were filled with sand and were sagging down toward his cheeks.
“Listen, you had a plan, Jamie. But the plan isn’t the story. It’s only what gets you off your ass so you can go find it.”
Jamie couldn’t remember the last time Willis had addressed him by his first name, if ever. And he had to admit: he liked it because being called Kramer had always been an unwelcome reminder of how and why he’d been hired, as the product of patronage.
“But look where it got me,” Jamie said. “My parents are hated on their own street. My father wants to kill me if this guy Grabstein, who can’t sell his house and has already bought a condo in Sarasota, doesn’t do it first.”
Willis shook his head. “You got a story, that’s what reporters do. And you want to be a reporter, don’t you?”
“I guess,” Jamie said.
“Don’t guess. Say you do and I’ll give you the chance. Six-month tryout, soon as we can replace you on the clerk schedule.”
He stood up, patted Jamie’s shoulder.
“Good job,” Willis said.
Jamie stared at coffee stains at the bottom of his Styrofoam cup and forced a smile.
“Oh, and congratulations on the other thing—the baby,” Willis said.
The other thing was a competing newsbreak on the day Jamie had flawlessly executed Operation Brookwell—a plan he had been so obsessed with that he never did check in at home with Karyn. Her urgent call to the office had gone unreturned.
He blew a story which couldn’t be rewritten. His son was born three weeks premature, almost strangling himself on a tangled umbilical cord, initially kept alive by a respirator. All this occurred in the sole, tearful company of the baby’s mother and her aunt.
Chapter Fourteen
Jamie returned with Aaron from lunch to find the house empty. Karyn was still out making her rounds, tightening her abs. Aaron toddled into the living room and made a beeline for the television set.
“Sez-me, dah-dee,” Aaron said.
“Ok, buddy,” Jamie said. “Let’s see if Sesame Street is on.”
He picked Aaron up from behind by the armpits and told him to press the red button. Jamie clicked on the PBS station with the remote. Aaron climbed onto the wicker couch with the off-white cushions—a wedding gift from Morris and Molly. Sesame Street was not on, but Aaron happily settled in to watch another program featuring a very tall man posing as a tree whose branches were being decorated by children with red and yellow streamers.
Jamie bent over to kiss his son’s cheek. He tasted bread granules from the gill-tee sandwich. He reached for the Times on the edge of the coffee table, knocking it to the floor, along with a thin paperback that was sitting underneath it. It was a travel guide for the American Northwest. The bookmark opened to a section on Seattle, wedged between the introduction and a color photo of the city’s famous space needle.
Shit, she’s really serious about this. Overnight Jamie had almost convinced himself that Karyn had merely been angling for leverage in what she imagined might become a financial crunch. She couldn’t really be thinking about picking up a two-year-old and moving across the country without knowing a soul in the new city?
Jamie stared at Aaron. His stomach began to knot. The telephone rang and provided a welcome distraction. But Molly’s voice surprised him, as much as his disoriented her.
“I was just calling, you know, to ask what the baby needs for his birthday,” she said.
Molly always referred to Aaron as the baby, as if she wasn’t allowed too personal a relationship in a family torn asunder. But Jamie had to grudgingly admit that Karyn did make an effort to include his parents, out of respect, he guessed, for Molly.
Several times, when visiting one of her friends in Brooklyn Heights, Karyn had driven out of her way to drop in on her former in-laws. Molly, so appreciative that Karyn would make the effort, would extol her generosity to Jamie. He recognized this as a wistful if hopeless appeal for reconciliation.
“I’m here with Aaron until Karyn gets back,” Jamie told Molly. He turned away from the couch and whispered. “I came to bring him his birthday gifts, but he’s not going to open them until Friday, when he has his party. Karyn wants him to get them all on one day.”
“Mine will be late then—unless I send it overnight mail,” Molly said.
“It’s alright, Mom,” he said. “Whenever it gets here—and whatever it is will be fine. Don’t get carried away.”
“I’ll call her later,” Molly said.
“Great,” Jamie said.
“So…you’ll be here later?”
“For what?”
“Dinner. Everyone’s coming. We talked about it. I thought you said you were coming.”
“Actually, we didn’t talk about it,” Jamie said. “You told me about it on the answering machine. But let me think for a minute.” What he meant was, “Let me think of an excuse,” but he couldn’t produce one fast enough.
“I guess I can make it,” he said.
“Good,” Molly said. Jamie noticed Aaron’s eyes were closing. “I’ll tell your father.”
“OK, fine,” Jamie said.
He hung up. Aaron was asleep, head drooping onto his shoulder. Jamie lifted him from the couch and carried him into Karyn’s room and laid him on the blue quilt. He climbed in alongside him and kissed his cheek. He checked his watch—it was just about time for Karyn to return.
Please, just another half-hour—this is so peaceful.
Jamie closed his eyes. Two minutes later he was sound asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
Molly pulled back the front door of the upstairs apartment. Jamie stepped inside and kissed his mother’s cheek. He was famished for a good meal but wary of what he would have to endure to enjoy it.
Thanksgiving was still two weeks away, but Molly figured that the striking Kramer men were in more immediate need. She blew her weekly food budget for a roast, some lamb and broiled chicken that was just tasteful enough but didn’t cause four-alarm blazes in Morris’ tender stomach.
“You hungry?” she said, pulling Jamie by the elbow into the cramped kitchen. “Come. Sit. Eat.”
And then, from his father, in so many stares, if not actual words: Leave.
As always, the number of dishes overwhelmed the table and there was no place setting for Molly. She usually prepared a plate for herself on the counter and picked at it between chores.
“Don’t worry about me,” she would say, though they had all given up years ago trying to get her to stop fussing and sit down. She never seemed to stop moving from one chore to another. If someone picked up a plate from the table to bring to the sink, Molly would appear suddenly to whisk it away to its destination as if she were running the final leg of a relay race. Morris would observe her from his seat, forever amused by and accepting of his wife’s determination to do everything.
Molly cooked as if she had been tipped off of a coming potato famine, with five variations available: roasted, mashed, boiled, sweet and the obligatory container of potato salad.
“Where’re the fries?” Becky asked, making eye contact with Jamie, her longtime partner in spoofing the family’s culinary habits.
Her frosted dyed hair was tied back with a red ribbon that matched the color of her sweater, accessorized by her trademark Star of David. The Kramers were far from religious though Jamie had had a bar mitzvah mainly to make his grandparents happy. Becky, who was three years older, got off easier. The old folks believed the religious passage into manhood was, well, for males. B
ecky liked to say she was devoutly Jewish, culturally speaking.
She was small, like Molly, but more full-bodied, like Morris and Jamie. But she and Molly were as simpatico as a mother and daughter living in virtually the same house needed to be to survive. They were not aggressive, demanding women. But somehow their husbands had an intuitive understanding that they were not to be trifled with.
“Ma, did you make the vegetables?” Becky said.
“Oh, good lord, I forgot to put the broccoli up,” Molly said, making a move away from the table. “Mickey, I’m so sorry. It’ll take me a minute…”
“No, Ma, it’s OK,” said Mickey, the vegetarian oddball in a family of dedicated carnivores. “I’m fine. There’s plenty.”
Jamie cut a piece of lamb onto his fork. Morris carved up the chicken without comment. The bathroom door opened in the hall. Uncle Lou whistled his way back to the table.
“Jamie,” Lou said, drying his hands on his gray slacks. “Good to see you. Were you at the rally today?”
Jamie considered lying but figured Molly, who knew better, might give him away. “Couldn’t make it,” he said. “I had to go see Aaron today. His birthday’s coming up.”
Jamie could see a smile form at the corner of his mother’s mouth. Approval, Jamie thought, what a wonderful concept. Molly was too damn easy when the matter was related to her only grandchild.
“So,” Jamie said. “How did Steven’s big speech go?”
“Where is Steven?” Molly interrupted. “I thought he was coming too.”
“No, he had plans, something to do with the union,” Lou said.
“He’s doing a television interview, I thought,” Jamie said.
“Television, that’s right, he mentioned that,” Lou said. “I don’t know where that kid gets it to speak in front of all those people. Not from me.”
“What’d he say?” Mickey asked.
“Hell of a speech,” Morris said, without looking up.
“Word came down that Brady has started hiring new reporters,” Lou said, looking at Mickey.
“Scabs, you mean,” Morris said.
“Soon as they heard that, most of the sportswriters went right in,” Lou said. “And I guess some of the other reporters were getting nervous, like they’ll actually keep these losers on after we settle,” Lou said. “So Steven gets up with this schvartzer, Carmen…”
“If you mean Carla, she’s actually Puerto Rican, not black or whatever you feel you have to call her,” Jamie said.
“It’s just an expression. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“Never mind,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, Carla something…?”
“Delgado,” Jamie said, sighing. “She’s the office manager.”
“Mario Cuomo was supposed to be there, but he didn’t show,” Lou said. “So a bunch of the union guys talked, the drivers’ guy, Colangelo, and then Stevie gets up. He’s wearing a suit—didn’t even know he had one. He’s looking like some executive hotshot and he says, ‘I just want to say something to my fellow journalists—the real journalists—not the cowards who run back because Brady puts a little pressure on them.’ So he starts going on about how the reporters are the conscience of the newspaper, the shapers of—what’d he call it, Mo? Moral something…?”
“Moral responsibility,” Morris said.
“Yeah, he starts telling stories of how workers get treated when there’s no union. ‘Forget raises. If they say the economy is bad, you get a pay cut! You get your health benefits slashed, and that’s if you don’t get laid off. If you don’t believe that we have an obligation to be out here fighting a monster like Brady, well, you shouldn’t even be in the newspaper business.’ Then he shakes his fist and starts yelling, ‘We are the journalists. We are the journalists!’ ”
Lou, his voice deep with mock authority, pounded a fist on the table and then cracked up.
“The next thing you know, they’re all cheering, ‘Brady sucks! Brady sucks!’ ”
“So all the reporters stayed out?” Mickey said.
Lou turned back to Jamie.
“You know of anyone going in?”
Jamie shook his head. “Other than the sports guys—I mean, no, I don’t. Not today at least.”
“You mean some still might cross?” Mickey said.
Jamie could sense them waiting for him to let something slip.
“I don’t know, Mick,” he said, turning away from his father and uncle.
Like Morris and Lou, Mickey was a staunch union man. Or at least one in the making when Ronald Reagan fired him and most of the air traffic controllers at Kennedy Airport in 1981. He was twenty-five and, fortunately, young and resourceful enough to change career course by enrolling in a Brooklyn College early education graduate program. He met Becky, a third-grade teacher in a public school where Mickey had landed as a kindergarten teacher.
Five years older than Becky, born in 1953, Mickey had grown up with Vietnam and Watergate. He was suspicious of what he called “the crooked corporate establishment” and, in retrospect, relieved that Reagan had forced him to pursue more fulfilling work.
“Ronald Reagan, my hero,” he would say, sarcastically.
Mickey’s most endearing quality, as far as Jamie could tell, was being blessed with the ability to evaluate whatever misfortune had befallen him as a prank engineered by some higher authority. The medical indignities of his and Becky’s ongoing infertility were the perfect example.
“We go to the clinic for an insemination on a Sunday morning because that’s the targeted day,” he confided to Jamie while he was working the Brookwell story and they had stepped out one night for a run to a Chinese restaurant.
“There’s like six other couples in the office, waiting for the nurse. She comes out and assigns all the husbands to a different numbered room, where there’s a little plastic cup waiting and a stack of pornography that could service an entire high school football team. She tells us, ‘After you finish, just put the lid on your specimen and bring it out here to the desk.’ The wives are left looking at each other, probably trying to be the first one not to break down and cry. But then you’re sitting there, behind the locked door, the magazine in your lap, your dick in your hand and you’re thinking, ‘Do I want to be the first one back or should I be last?’”
He asked the question so casually that Jamie failed for a few seconds to process the hilarity of the predicament.
That was pure Mickey, and that was also the moment when Jamie realized how much he had wanted Becky to be pregnant too, especially after Aaron was born. More than two years later, he was still rooting, though the subject was now entirely too stressful for even Mickey to make light of.
He was forty, Becky thirty-five. Time was no longer their ally.
“What I’m sensing and hearing is that there’s some anger with some reporters about the way this all went down,” Jamie said.
“How do you mean?” Mickey said.
“People feel like we were forced out, like the unions don’t realize how hard it’s going to be to win. They’re worried, and I’ll tell you something—they should be because they could lose their jobs. All this talk about Mario Cuomo, as if he or anyone else gives a crap about what happens to us. And for most of us, it’s not as simple to just be out in the street.”
He paused a few seconds.
“I mean, it’s not as easy as it is for Steven.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lou said.
Jamie turned back to his uncle. He could feel his father’s eyes on him.
“Some people have real financial issues here, Uncle Lou. Steve’s a single guy—no kids, makes a lot of money, at least for what we do. You’ve got family people out on the street who can’t afford to go a month without a paycheck, much less put their jobs on the line.”
“Jamie, you don’t think we know that?” Lou said. “Do you know how many times we’ve been through this?” He glanced sideways at Morris. “Maybe you don’t remember when you were a
kid that we had families who lost their apartments and houses when we struck for months, and had to stay with us, sleep on the couch, on the floor…”
“I remember, but that was a different time. How many papers were there, how many jobs? I was talking to Pat Blaine the other day. He said Brady’s been setting this all up, baiting us, just like he did at his other papers.”
“What other papers?”
“Dublin…London.”
“What does London have to do with us?” Lou said.
Lou’s interests in labor were strictly related to his own local. He had a lifelong habit of relying on Morris to tell him what he needed to know.
“It involved the printers, mainly,” Morris said. “Murdoch started it when he bought the biggest paper there, and he wanted to take back the power the unions always had. He and Brady got the government to pass laws that made it almost impossible to halt the printing and distribution of the papers during a strike. Then he built new plants that were like armed camps.”
He looked straight at Jamie for the first time.
“But that’s not happening here, no matter what one of your friends is telling you.”
“Look,” Jamie said. “All I’m saying is that we’re all putting our jobs at risk knowing if we lose them we may not be able to find another one.”
Lou looked at Morris for help. Morris looked like he’d already had enough of the discussion.
“Jamie, you want to talk about risk?” Lou said. “What about our union? We’ve got lifetime job guarantees that we all fought like dogs for when they automated the paper, when you were kids. How many times we were told to get out into the street if we want to save a job that’s worth having—you don’t think we were scared?”
“You know, Uncle Lou, maybe being scared or tough doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Jamie said. “Maybe it’s about loyalty to your own members first. I mean, these drivers, they go around beating the crap out of people—poor guys just trying to make a buck…”
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